I've never really understood why Jakob Nielsen is revered as the authority on usability. I certainly don't find his website at all pleasant to use, but calling it user-hostile seems rather bombastic, which is why I don't like this term.
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UpTheCreekMay 10 '11 at 6:29

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@UpTheCreek: You may want to consider the term user-apathetic.
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Stuart P. BentleyMay 24 '11 at 21:13

It's probably the most accurate hyphenated expression at least, although it does bring to mind some image of a computer hitting the user on the head with the hammer. Perhaps it was a layer 8 problem, after all?
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shinyspoongodJun 19 '12 at 6:45

Intuitive (and thus, unintuitive) refers to the trait a person might have of being able to intuit. The object that is being intuited is referred to as being intuitable; the antonym would be 'unintuitable'.
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YahelMay 10 '11 at 2:10

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Actually, I prefer unintuitive, but both of these are good choices, and probably better convey "user-unfriendliness" than does user-hostile, which in my opinion is a stronger negative than what is probably desired.
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John YMay 10 '11 at 2:11

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@yc01: What you say may have been the case at one point, but that ship has long since sailed. (I'm not even sure it was ever in port, frankly.) Your meaning is listed as 3rd in Merriam-Webster's entry. I would think most modern dictionaries corroborate the use of intuitiveness to refer (usually) to the thing being intuited.
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John YMay 10 '11 at 2:17

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@yc01: Well, you could ask a question about it here (and I think you will find that she is wrong)
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BlueRaja - Danny PflughoeftMay 10 '11 at 6:09

I would go with 'unfriendly'. The 'user' part is redundant, particularly in the case of software. In fact uses of it outside the scope of software are really "loans" of the term.

In any case I would argue that most synonyms of "unfriendly" don't convey the same precision, and have fundamentally different meanings. Software can be "unfriendly" because it's cumbersome (it takes too many gestures to acomplish a task) even if it's easy to use (it's always obvious what the right gesture is). Similarly words like "complex", "slow", "ugly", "poorly designed", "unintuitive" etc all cary degrees of precision that are either more or less precise than "unfriendly".

So, I think "unfriendly" really is the best choice when you want to convey a "general defect in the usability or character of an interface". The alternatives almost always convey something fundamentally different.

Often I find the antonym for user-friendly is the word cryptic, although it may be too specific in some cases. I can see situations where a very graphical interface is wholly unintuitive but not necessarily cryptic—just lousy.